The Farwalker's Quest Page 10

  To Ariel’s dismay, he did not start with the knot at her neck but with the rope at Orion’s belly. When it slipped free, the horse tossed his head and relaxed.

  Zeke bent to the hobble. Ariel had to mash her lips together to stop herself from hissing at him. Instead she fluttered her fingers to catch his attention. They couldn’t possibly escape on anything as noisy as a horse. Zeke ignored her gestures for his own, suggesting that she watch the men. Helpless, she obeyed.

  With one hand hindered by his splint, Zeke took an excruciating length of time to untie the hobble. To Ariel’s astonishment, when it came loose, he still didn’t move to untie her. Instead he slipped the hobble rope around Orion’s throat, led him two measly steps, and let the horse drop his nose again to the grass. The boy hunkered against Orion’s shoulder so his silhouette couldn’t betray him if the Finders should awaken and look up. Straining to interpret every sound, Ariel counted helplessly as Orion’s teeth ripped five times at the grass. Only then did Zeke lead him another few steps.

  Her mind screamed: they’d never get away taking two steps for every five bites!

  Yet Zeke’s strategy had merits. Repeatedly one of Ariel’s captors thrashed in his sleep. Twice she saw a head lift. All that could be seen were the dark shapes of a girl on a horse cropping grass, not far from where that horse first had been hobbled. Both times, the head dropped back into sleep.

  A horseback rider never moved so slowly, nor a night so fast. Zeke began stealing anxious glances at the sky. Ariel had almost grown resigned to being captured a hundred feet from where they had started when her friend picked up the pace. No more grass for Orion. Soon they’d doubled their distance from Elbert and Scarl.

  A few moments later, Zeke paused to untie Ariel’s hands. She freed her own neck, and then Zeke tied that longer rope around Orion’s nose in a makeshift halter. Fearing they’d never control the horse without something better than that, Ariel nonetheless took the loose end when he offered it. Her hands trembled. Surely this was the part when the night would begin erupting with shouts.

  Zeke led the horse to a downed log, which he stepped onto. He breathed, “Help me up.”

  His familiar voice sent a trill of joy through her. She pulled on his arm as he clambered aboard behind her. She wanted to turn and hug him tight to her heart. Questions flocked to her lips. There was no time for either.

  “Hang on tight,” he whispered in her ear. He reached around her to grab a handful of mane and the halter rope so they both had a grip.

  In terror, Ariel nudged the horse with her legs. Zeke added a thump with his heels, and their mount picked up a lazy trot. In the darkness, even this gentle speed stuck Ariel’s tongue to the roof of her mouth. Trees and rocks loomed, whisking past on all sides. Frequently Orion lurched left or right, stumbling on the uneven ground. If he lost his footing badly enough to go down, their fall could be deadly. Her heart pounding louder than the horse’s hooves in the grass, Ariel clutched tight and bent low, afraid a branch would sweep one or both of them off while Orion kept going. Zeke tried to steer, tugging the rope, but clearly the horse was in charge.

  As tense minutes passed without any sound of pursuit, Ariel felt safe to whisper, “Where are the others?”

  “What others?”

  Part of her had known it already, yet she cringed at the truth. “The Fishers! Your father! Is my mother all right? Why did you come by yourself?”

  “Talk later,” Zeke said. “Let’s go faster.” He bounced his legs harder against Orion’s ribs. As the horse sped slightly, both riders struggled simply to remain mounted.

  Ariel noticed that the horse mainly chose to descend. When they jigged out of the trees into a meadow, her heart flipped. She felt exposed to any Finders looking down from above.

  “We can’t just let Orion go where he wants,” she told Zeke. “He might circle back to Scarl. Besides, we’re headed the wrong way.”

  “I have an idea that might help.”

  Letting Orion slow and then stop, Zeke slithered down. He undid the makeshift halter and tied two knots a hand’s width apart in the middle of the rope. Lifting the horse’s rubbery lip, he shoved the rope into the gap in Orion’s teeth where a bridle bit would have rested. The horse flopped his tongue around the strange thing in his mouth, but he didn’t object. The knots on either side kept the rope from slipping through, so the riders had a rough set of reins. Ariel let herself feel a sparkle of hope.

  “How’d you think of that?” she wondered.

  “I’ve been watching and thinking a long while,” he said.

  As he rejoined her, Ariel studied the hills emerging from the darkness.

  “We’ve got to cross back over the mountains,” she said. “Do you see where we came down?”

  “It was all I could do to keep up,” Zeke replied, “so I doubt I can find the route back. But we’ve got to get away from them first. We can figure out which direction home is in later.” He nudged Orion back into motion.

  Ariel’s mind raced. “Maybe someone at the roadhouse would help us!”

  When she explained what she’d heard about that place, Zeke shook his head.

  “That’s what they’ll expect,” he argued. “They’ll go there straight off.”

  “But, Zeke …” Her voice faded. The weight of their challenge fell on her heart. Whatever supplies hid in Zeke’s small knapsack couldn’t help much. How were two young people alone supposed to evade two angry Finders?

  “Let’s just keep going as fast as we can,” Zeke added, tilting his face to the paling sky. “They’ll wake up soon, if they haven’t already.”

  Dread sliced through Ariel. It would take only seconds for Scarl and Elbert to see that Orion had done more than hobble away after grass. Cursing would fill the air. Then they’d search—and they’d find.

  A hopeless calm settled over her dread. They’d be caught, with horrid results. Until then, they merely played a bitter game to see how long losing would take. The game held a twist of satisfaction, however: Elbert’s cruelty had helped her escape. She wondered how the Finders would settle their bet. She’d won that round, her mind jeered. Pretending to play another made it easier for Ariel to think.

  “Can’t you ask a tree which way to go?” she asked.

  When Zeke didn’t answer, she swiveled. He shook his head curtly without meeting her eyes.

  Afraid to break into his stony demeanor, Ariel looked for another idea. She knew the mountain pass had to lie nearly due west, but so did Elbert and Scarl. Some instinct told her that for this game—hide-and-seek—south would serve better. Her dangling feet twitched that direction like the needle of an inverted compass.

  “All right.” Taking charge of their rope reins, she goaded the horse and tugged on one side to turn him. “If you won’t pick a direction, I will.”

  CHAPTER

  16

  Smoke stung Ariel’s nostrils. Skirting a blackberry patch, she and Zeke nearly collided with an outhouse just past the brambles. They sidled into its shadow while their eyes picked out the rundown roadhouse nearby. Little more than a hut, it looked abandoned, but chimney smoke lay in the air along with an aroma of breakfast.

  A blast of longing hit Ariel. A building with a roof spoke a different language from the one that had moaned to her daily of earthen beds and cold rain.

  “If we told them we were stolen, wouldn’t they help us?” she pleaded.

  “Why should they?” Zeke crushed her quick hopes. “If Elbert says he’s our father, how could we prove he was lying?”

  Ariel stared at the empty promise of safety. A whimper leaked from her throat.

  “Look.” Zeke pointed. “A trail.” A narrow path curled uphill into the trees on the far side of the roadhouse. Ariel’s heart resounded as if she had known it would be there.

  “If we take it, though,” Zeke worried, “we might be easier to follow.”

  “It won’t matter if we don’t get farther away—and that’s how!” She could no longer stand
the feeling that Scarl and Elbert would soon grasp at their backs. She smacked her heels on the horse.

  Startled, Orion leaped into the yard of the roadhouse, nearly leaving his riders behind. Ariel folded low and kept pumping her feet. Zeke clutched her, barely hanging on. Orion tore past the roadhouse toward the trail, his hooves thudding.

  A pair of startled eyes may have appeared in the hut’s lone window as they passed. By the time that uncertain impression filtered into Ariel’s mind, the observer could have seen little but receding haunches.

  Galloping felt glorious and terrifying. The only other time Ariel had gone so fast on Orion, she’d been stuffed in a bag. Branches reached to scratch them from alongside the overgrown path. The horse’s hooves clattered on rocks. Too late, Ariel realized the noise might echo all the way to the Finders’ ears. She decided she didn’t care. As long as Orion could run, the space between them grew wider. Even Elbert couldn’t travel as fast as a galloping horse.

  They ran until sunlight crept down the hills. The horse heaved, nostrils flared. Finally his riders let him slow. The trail twisted through foothills, trees lining it most of the time, for which Ariel was grateful. It would make them harder to spot from a distance.

  “Now tell me, Zeke,” she said at last. “Why didn’t anyone come with you?”

  She felt him lay his cheek against her shoulder.

  “I don’t want to tell you,” he sighed. “If I don’t, when we get home, maybe none of it will be true.”

  Her throat clenched. Finally she swallowed the lump. “My mother—?” she whispered.

  Zeke circled his arms around her. His head didn’t lift off her shoulder.

  “She’s dead, Ariel. One of them killed her.”

  A buzz slid between Ariel’s ears and her brain. It blocked the sound of hoofbeats and Zeke’s nearby breathing. It drowned the cheerful chirping of birds. It could not, however, silence words she’d already heard.

  Her mind found a crack she might slip through to escape. “No. You didn’t see it. You couldn’t. It was dark. She—” Her voice broke.

  Zeke just hugged harder.

  If only he had protested! If he had repeated himself or told her to stop it, she could have believed he was lying or teasing or wrong. His silence wiped away hope. For days she had felt as though vital juices were leaking out through a hole in her chest. Now the hollow space that remained collapsed hard, crushing what was left of her heart.

  The buzzing took over Ariel’s thoughts for a while. When it finally faded, she realized that Zeke had been speaking.

  “… under the dock. He didn’t know that I saw, but I did.”

  “What?” she said crossly. “I didn’t hear you.”

  Zeke shifted behind her. “Which part?”

  “Any of it. Whatever you said. What was under the dock?”

  He took a deep breath. “Never mind. We don’t have to talk about it.”

  Clop, clop, clop rose from Orion’s hooves below them.

  “But why didn’t anyone come after me?” Like a fishhook, that puzzle tugged on Ariel’s mind. It wouldn’t let her sink back into the buzzing. “Even … even if … what you said before.”

  “Nobody knew you were stolen at first.”

  “But my mother …”

  “They thought she’d gone with you. That’s what Elbert told some of the Reapers that night—that he offered to take her along, too, and that swayed her. She wouldn’t worry if she was traveling with you.”

  “Where was she?” The dull words formed by themselves.

  “She—her body washed up under one of the docks.”

  The notion was so fantastic, Ariel could pretend it was one of Storian’s tales. A silly story, that’s what it was, about someone who didn’t swim as well as her mother. Ariel did not need to cry. Tears were for girls whose mothers were dead.

  Zeke added, “Windmaster found her on the late-morning tide.”

  A flare of anger seared up through her guts. “But if Windmaster knew, why didn’t anyone figure out Elbert’s lie? And chase us?”

  “By then it was too late.”

  “You caught up! You found us!”

  “That’s not what I meant. It was too late for anyone to be brave enough.”

  “What are you talking about?” she demanded. “The Fishers are brave. And your dad—”

  “Don’t.” What felt like Zeke’s forehead dropped against the back of her head. “My dad is … it’s like he’s sick or sleepwalking. It’s like the whole of Canberra Docks got stuck in a bad dream and they’re too scared to even wake up.”

  Unable to add up this terrible math, Ariel just waited, numb. By then she knew that awful answers came by themselves, whether she sought them or not.

  A few heaving breaths later, Zeke spoke again.

  “The Finders burned the sycamore when they left that night. My maple, too. She tried to speak to me a little before she—” His voice cracked. He swallowed. “They must have used flame-fix. The Flame-Mage wouldn’t admit that she’d traded any to Elbert or Scarl. But one of them must have put something like that on the trees. By the time I saw the sycamore in the morning, it was all black and twisted, and grown-ups were wailing or stumbling around in a daze.” A few more words shoved out of his throat, but Ariel could not understand them. They were too swaddled with tears.

  They rocked with Orion’s motion, each alone in their shock. A bitter slime rose from Ariel’s heart to her mouth. She was glad to consider the horrible fate of the trees. It kept her mind from the black, buzzing corner where she’d stuffed any thought of her mother. The idea of burning a tree whipped Ariel’s world upside down. For all of their cruelty, Scarl and Elbert still had been men. But only lightning or wildfire or other insane things could burn a tree still growing out of the ground. A person who did it must be as alien as the creatures that lived in the dark depths of the sea.

  Ariel shifted one hand to cover Zeke’s fingers. There was still another person nearby who was not such a monster. It was the only comfort she could give or receive.

  But sharp thoughts began piercing her mind. Each sliced straight through to her heart: no more tender glances, no good night kisses, no arms to draw Ariel close. No skirts rustling at dawn to call her from bed. No and no. None. The no’s hit her one after another, each knocking her down a terrible, bone-breaking stair. Each jolt left her breathless. No mother. No home.

  “Don’t cry anymore,” Zeke whispered after a while.

  Lost in no, Ariel had not been aware of her tears. She hadn’t even known she was still riding a horse. The road had been lost behind glimpses of a mother who no longer awaited in a home that no more could be found.

  “It’ll be okay,” Zeke added. He gulped, draining his words of conviction. “Someday.”

  “No!” Filled so full of that word, Ariel had to voice it. “No, it won’t! Never!” Some of her pain squeezed out as anger. If he had not been behind her, she would have hit him. Zeke would go home to two parents. She’d lost the only one she still had.

  She clenched her hands to her chest and curled over her stomach, not caring if she fell off the horse. A tuft of mane muffled her wail. “You can find a different tree!” she cried. “I can’t find a different mother!”

  A distant part of her cringed. Zeke didn’t deserve her anger. Her heart turned away from that whisper of conscience, not able to heed it right now.

  “No, I can’t,” he replied quietly. “But I know what you mean. I’m so sorry.”

  She let his words, which confused her, dissolve in her grief. Too stricken to make room for anyone else’s pain, she didn’t want to understand what he’d just said.

  Miles passed beneath her, unknown and unnoticed. Eventually, drained to dregs, Ariel looked up and unfolded her limbs. She hated her own arms and legs for daring to ache. They seemed to be mocking her heart.

  She twisted to look at Zeke. Anxiety sculpted his face.

  “Why did you come?” she wondered.

  “Because.�
� His eyes slid away from hers.

  “Because I promised. And because nobody else would.”

  Hollow, she waited to be filled with more of Zeke’s horrible knowledge.

  “The burning made everyone crazy,” he added. “It took hours before anyone noticed you and your mother were gone. And more till the Windmaster found … what he did. Then they knew you’d been stolen but they pretended you weren’t. Even my—everyone. They were scared what else might happen, I guess, and they blamed your mother for ignoring the sycamore’s advice. Besides, without the help of the trees, nobody knew which way to look.”

  “You found me,” she murmured, grateful. What she’d heard made his presence behind her even more of a marvel.

  “They sacrificed you,” he growled. “Just like Fishers throw flowers into the sea during Fallfest. ‘Please don’t drown us this winter; here’s some flowers instead.’ And then they wanted to forget. That’s what the maple tree said.”

  “Your maple? I thought they bur—”

  “They did!” He shouted, hurting Ariel’s ear. “But I ran there right away when I saw the smoke. She—” His voice gurgled. “The sycamore burned first, I guess. When I got to my maple, she hadn’t left the world yet. She cried that I should help you. I didn’t know how, but I promised I would. She told me to listen, that voices would help. Then she … she faded. Only scorched wood was left. And I’ll hate the Flame-Mage forever. Forever!”

  “I’m sorry, Zeke,” Ariel whispered, frightened by the savage tone in his voice. “Sorry for everything. Except I’m not sorry you came. I am so, so glad. Even if they catch us and kill us, I am so glad to see you again first.”

  “I won’t let them,” Zeke snarled, with more outrage and fury than a boy not quite thirteen years old should be able to hold. Ariel believed him.

  They never startled Orion into another gallop that day, but they trotted and walked many miles. They stopped only for water and to munch fiddleheads from a thicket of ferns. As their path climbed and day faded to night, they seemed to near heaven. Peaks cloaked the horizon. Stars pricked the black sky. Zeke pulled a blanket from his pack and wrapped it as best he could around both of them to ward off the chill alpine air.